The battle is in the "Customer Interfaces"...

Uber,
the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most
popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer,
has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns
no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

Since
the Industrial Revolution, the world has developed complex supply chains, from
designers to manufacturers, from distributors to importers, wholesalers and
retailers, it’s what allowed billions of products to be made, shipped, bought
and enjoyed in all corners of the world. In recent times the power of the
Internet, especially the mobile phone, has unleashed a movement that’s rapidly
destroying these layers and moving power to new places.

The
Internet is the most powerful mechanism we can imagine to match perfectly
individuals that need something, and people with something to offer. The moment
started slowly by reducing complexity and removing the middle layer in the late
1990s. From insurance to early PC makers like Dell to travel agents, this time
seemed to be an age where “direct” became a desirable moniker. This time
seemed to favor scale and efficiency over service or brand, for commodities
like insurance cover or processing power, the overheads of sales, marketing and
retail footprint were stripped away.

By
2015 things changed. The balance of power between the different service layers
is a jostle for control. Price-comparison sites first seemed to provide welcome
traffic to airlines before airlines tried and failed to starve them of their
business and promoted their own apps and websites as the preferred route. But
it was too late. Services like Ocado once offered a symbiotic relationship with
supermarkets, yet now supermarkets fear the power that such companies get when
they get closer to the customer. In this age, the customer interface is
everything. There are two approaches.

Full
Stack Companies

Full
stack companies like Tesla, Warby Parker, BuzzFeed, Nest or Harry’s seek to
ensure control by owning all layers. From R&D to marketing, from
distribution to sales, these companies do it all. It’s a great way to keep
profit in the family, yet it’s harder to scale and build.

The
Interface Owners

The
new breed of companies are the fastest-growing in history. Uber, Instacart,
Alibaba, Airbnb, Seamless, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google: These companies
are indescribably thin layers that sit on top of vast supply systems ( where
the costs are) and interface with a huge number of people ( where the
money is). There is no better business to be in. The New York Times needs to
write, fact check, buy paper, print and distribute newspapers to get their ad
money. Facebook provides a platform for us to write our own content, and
Twitter monetizes the front page of newspapers, which happens to now be the
Twitter feed.

Our
relationships are no longer with the service providers. Our mobile operators
seem like dumb data pipes while WhatsApp provides the services we value and can
monetize our attention.

The
Interface Is Where the Profit Is

The
interface layer is where all the value and profit is. Withings scales can cost
five times than other weighing solutions because the addition of an app makes
it smart health management, not just weight measurement.

Phillips
Hue lighting can make 1,000 times more profit than a colored light bulb because
it’s a home emotion system. Sonos beats any other music system I’ve tried
because the experience of music while using it is delightful.

The
value is in the software interface, not the products. It’s not just the smart
home. Uber provides average cars in a premium way; Seamless makes the most
disgusting of greasy kebab joints appealing and makes its margin from both
sides. iTunes for many years took virtually all the profit made in the entire
music industry by being just the thin software between the hard work making
tunes and the money selling them.

Big
Battles For the Customer Interface

The
Internet age means building things is nothing other than code. We’re going
to see a non-stop battle to leap ahead of each other. And also get more wide,
Twitter may have started out as a microblogging platform, but it’s now aiming
to be a way to exploit its audience to distribute TV content. Facebook’s
attempts with news content now make it a news channel and thanks to Autoplay
video, soon a way to watch TV content. Snapchat’s discovery features turned the
IM platform into a way to consume TV content.

In
the modern age, having icons on the homepage is the most valuable real estate
in the world, and trust is the most important asset. If you have that, you’ve a
license to print money until someone pushes you out of the way. So the
question becomes, what are you going to do to stay there or get there? And once
there, how do you exploit it?.

Una alternativa financiera para empresas y particulares... Initial Coin Offerings can be considered as an alternative form of crowdfunding that has emerged outside of the traditional financial system. This model has helped a lot of successful projects and companies get the funding required to start their business. In 2013, over US$5.1 billion were raised via crowdfunding worldwide, which increased to US$16 billion in 2014 and was estimated at over US$34 billion in 2015. https://topicolist.com/

The momentum behind crypto remains powerful. Bitcoin is still worth seven times what it was just a year ago. In the first quarter of this year, according to CoinDesk, a news service, $6.3bn was raised through initial coin offerings (ICOs), a form of funding in which firms issue digital tokens, more than in all of 2017. Up till July of 2017, the total dollar amount raised in Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) was a staggering USD$1,252,676,352. That’s over a billion dollars raised within a span of 7 mon…

Mr Jiménez is the
Chairman of maat International (www.maat-g.com), the holding company for one of
the most innovative and fast growing privately owned Corporate &
Technology& Infrastructure Professional Services (est. 1999). His
leadership and business experience accumulated both in Public and Private
Sector marked a change in the Corporate Strategy of Professional Services in
order to diversify maat International offering into the Corporate Services
(Multilateral Agencies, Investment Funds, Private Equities, Development
Funds,…); Property Development, Housing,Energy, Transport Infrastructures, Agriculture and Trading industry in
Africa and LATAM and Research & Development in it the Cloud Computing
industry. He has been a venture capitalist in various companies and he is a
foundi…